The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently put out a press release which announced that six of the 13 root servers in the root zone (presumably located in-between the Phantom Zone and the Forbidden Zone) now had IPv6 addresses.

It's a small step but one which is necessary for bigger steps to follow. With the root name servers having IPv6 addresses, it paves the way for a full IPv6 end-to-end transmission path for data. The fact that the nameservers still relied on IPv4 made at least some form of IPv4 over IPv6 necessary for Internet transmission.

We were able to ask a few questions about the IPv6 assignment to ICANN and got answers from David Conrad, Vice President of Research and IANA Strategy.

NPD: Why only six of the 13 root servers?

Conrad: 6 of the 13 were ready at this time. Each of the root servers is run independently and are funded through internal means (that is, in general, no one is paying any of the root server operators to operate a root server directly). The 6 that requested ICANN add IPv6 records were the ones that had finished setting up their IPv6 infrastructure sufficiently to provide service.

NPD: Could you explain a bit about the 512 byte limit on the packet sizes?

Conrad: The original specification of the DNS protocol chose 512 bytes as a reasonable approximation of the largest packet that could get through the Internet (of the time, circa 1983) without being fragmented. Enhancements to the DNS protocol since then have allowed for an increase in that limit (specifically, requesters can indicate how large a packet they're willing to accept).

NPD: How will computers get the new info about the root name servers' new IP addresses?

Conrad: The only computers that will actually need the new information are DNS caching servers. When a caching server starts up, it asks one of the 13 root servers it has pre-configured (the root hints) for an up-to-date list of all the root servers. It then uses that new list.

DNS caching servers are typically operated by ISPs or the IT departments of large enterprises. Average PCs and workstations send their DNS queries to these caching servers.

NPD: Would this require operating system upgrades/patches?

Conrad: A patch will likely be supplied to make the change in the root hints permanent (the updated list obtained by the caching servers isn't generally written to disk), but as described previously, caching servers will be able to use the new addresses without the patch.

Is this a significant move towards standardizing Internet traffic on IPv6? Tell us your thoughts in our comments section below.

Recently, Network Performance Daily did a story on the Cisco Nexus 7000 switch, which had recently been announced by Cisco and will likely be a very important piece of enterprise hardware.

After our article, Douglas Gourlay, the Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management of Cisco's Data Center Business Unit, contacted us and pointed out that we were mistaken about some of the capabilities of the Cisco Nexus 7000 and so we invited him to do this podcast with us.

SuperTuesday is coming up in less than a week, and many people, (including myself,) are chomping at the bit to talk about politics.

Don't get me wrong; this is a blog focused on issues that affect network performance in enterprise (read: business) environments, and politics and vendor blogs go together like potassium chlorate and gummi bears - a whole lot of heat, sparks, and violent reactions that take forever to die down. But, if nothing else, U.S. technology policy affects U.S. technology companies. Network neutrality and broadband policy will affect those companies hoping to roll out SAAS solutions, H1B visas will affect the tech job market and innovation, and of course there are the fundamental questions about data security and privacy that have become issues over the past decade.

Among the tech blogosphere there were two politics-related events that may be of interest to our readers. The first was that Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch interviewed Mitt Romney. Arrington focused on technology growth policies in the U.S., Internet taxes, H1B visas, venture capital tax issues, and renewable energy, and it's an interesting read if you're a Republican currently mulling which candidate to support in the primaries.

The second, from a stranger source, came from Randall Munroe, the author of the technology focused webcomic, XKCD, who used his public forum to endorse Barack Obama, because of Obama's association with copyright-reformer Lawrence Lessig, his support for network neutrality, among other reasons.

(This may not seem significant, but Munroe is not just any comic artist. XKCD focuses on high tech issues - including a few editorial cartoons regarding technology and science policy - and it is one of the most popular on the Internet, rivaling Penny Arcade. Because of this, Google invited Munroe to speak last month as part of their Authors@Google series of lectures, an honor shared with Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Brokaw, among others. In less than two years, Munroe has become the pre-eminent technology editorial cartoonist - all with a few crudely drawn stick figures.)

Whether or not Munroe's endorsement will carry any weight is yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean that technology issues aren't real and considerable, and if the guys who actually know something about technology don't speak up, well, then we're left with the talking heads on cable news shows who have trouble understanding even basic computer concepts, let alone subtle computer issues.

During the main election season, technology issues will probably not be the foremost on voters' minds, so primary elections are extremely important for those who believe that a solid technology policy is important to U.S. national prosperity. While we'd feel uncomfortable (and kind of icky) endorsing any particular candidate, we've put together a list of the top ten current technological controversies which you should consider before voting.

1) Intellectual Property Laws

There is not one portion of the tech industry that is untouched by the intellectual property laws, both current and proposed. First, any company that makes software, either for resale or in-house, has to be aware of their rights under copyright law to preserve their own products. Any company that uses - in whole or in part - open-source software needs to be aware of how open-source licenses work - that is, open-source code remains under the copyright of the author, who may be very specific about who may or may not use the license.

Additionally, the current entertainment industry crackdown on pirated materials affects enterprise networking in a number of ways. First, there's the question of liability of an end-user on the corporate network uses it to distribute material when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder - while traffic is a consideration, it's also a consideration that if you aggressively patrol your network for copyright violations, you can find yourself liable if a copyright violation gets through the tracks. This leaves enterprise networking in a precarious position - police the network and assume the legal liability, or take sanctuary in "safe-harbor" provisions and allow the traffic of illicitly traded files to clog up your network.

There is a middle ground where certain types of traffic can be prevented from taking up bandwidth necessary for business applications - without looking at the individual files in deep packet inspection, using QoS policies, and that seems to be the best solution right now. However, any changes to copyright law would have a profound effect on the ways that companies do business, and that is why everyone in IT should be keeping an eye on this issue.

2) Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure

American broadband infrastructure is simply not quite up to the standards of other countries. Japan, Korea, and France are often touted as having much better broadband than the U.S., with various explanations given regarding U.S. having a lower population density. However, it seems dubious because there's little correlation between population density and broadband penetration when you look at actual states.

The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.

Just as the highways developed by the Eisenhower administration helped to foster America's post-war manufacturing boom, better broadband infrastructure can help foster America's technology industry. An ubiquitous, high quality broadband can mean more applications can be run as a Web service out on the Internet instead of the WAN. More bandwidth for everybody means that the bandwidth for your company becomes cheaper and they can afford more of it, which means that existing apps will run faster (presuming there aren't other network performance problems) and that you'll be able to run high-bandwidth apps such as Cisco Telepresence.

Even if your company is sitting on more dark fiber than a bowl of NinjaBran™, every company relies on smaller companies as vendor product makers, as distributors, as customers - and those smaller companies are relying more on SAAS solutions. In the grand scheme of the business world ecosystem, communications infrastructure policy can have far-reaching effects.

3) Spectrum Regulation/Allocation

When people think of bandwidth, they often think of bits traveling down pipes. The other type of bandwidth is just as important; the bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because you can't run two different signals on the same frequency (they would interfere with each other,) the FCC allocates which frequencies are going to be used for which purpose - and some frequencies are better suited towards different purposes.

For example, currently, there is an auction for the 700MHZ band - a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum which can penetrate through walls, and can cover a very wide area. This made it very desirable for the television stations which now control the bandwidth, and also very desirable for cell phone companies currently bidding for the bandwidth when the television stations must return the bandwidth to the FCC as part of the analog/digital TV switchover in 2009.

Anything that deals with broadcasting of any sort - wireless networking, WiMax, even telecommunications ownership - goes through the FCC, making it one of the most important and powerful Federal commissions. Decisions made by the FCC can affect any rollouts your company makes regarding wireless networking or cellular technology.

4) Network Neutrality

If you haven't been keeping up on this one, it's a doozy, and you might want to check out the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject. The possibility of network neutrality legislation - or the actions of big-business players in the absence of network neutrality legislation, can mean fundamental changes in the way that bits travel over the wire.

We won't get into a rundown of issues here, but while you can plan for a neutral Internet or a non-neutral Internet, it is much harder to prepare contingencies while this matter remains up in the air.

Some candidates have expressed support for network neutrality legislation, others opposition, and still others ambivalence - and depending on which position is the best for you and your company, it may be something to consider.

We'll cover Telecom Immunity and Privacy, Open Government Initiatives, Energy Policy, and Immigration and Education in Part II of this series tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment below to discuss these issues.

The Aberdeen Group, a provider of business research services surveyed 205 organizations last month to identify best practices for enterprise network visibility initiatives and controls. They called the report "The Real Value of Network Visibility."

In the interests of full disclosure, it should be said that NetQoS co-sponsored the study but we did so only after the survey was conducted and the analysis complete. That said, though, the study pretty much validates our entire "performance first" approach towards network and application performance management.

What the Aberdeen Group suggests is a PACE model (Pressures, Actions, Capabilities, and Enablers) to achieve corporate goals. The idea is that businesses are pressured to be responsible to customer needs, and the actions that are effective are to establish a proactive control of the network. In order to do this, you need to be capable of defining your escalation pathways for network performance issues, having normal networking performance baselines, understand interdependencies between applications on the network, be able to segment round-trip application response times into delays caused by the server, the network, and the application, and finally, have a centralized point for looking at the network performance data.

Frequent readers of this blog will no doubt notice that this is the point where I usually mention that NetQoS makes some of the products which enable those capabilities. The Aberdeen Group reports that these "enablers" are network performance monitoring through a Web interface, tools for remote analysis and troubleshooting of network performance, tools for creating custom profiles for monitoring groups of network hardware, a unified network performance and security platform, tools for Netflow data analysis, and a lab environment to simulate network performance.

There are some other gems in there to be found. The survey results showed that that top 20% of performance scorers:

• Were the most likely to have the capabilities and enablers mentioned under the PACE model.
• Were spending less time on troubleshooting network performance and application performance, managing changes to network design, or enforcing network usage policies.
• Were much more likely to have merged application and network management into a single job role, and more likely to merge the application, network, and systems management teams into a single organizational unit.
• Were able to fix problems faster and less likely to rely on calls to the help desk for determining network problems.

What do you think about the Aberdeen Group's report? Feel free to leave a comment below.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

If it sounds like you've read this story before, you probably have. Internet politics in 2000 was newsworthy because, like anyone on AOL, politicians had their own Web pages. In 2004, internet politics were newsworthy because, like anyone with a Blogger.com account, politicians had their own blogs. The new technology of the Web which will "revolutionize politics" this coming election year, but which everyone seems to have found out about two years ago, seems to be YouTube and other "Web 2.0" applications. At least, that's what CNN seems to have focused on with its recent "YouTube" debate of the Democratic Presidential Primaries.

Franken's campaign site will soon include this "Web2.0-style" interactive events map (top) and automatic slideshow (bottom,) seen here in a late beta version. Schlough informed NPD that it would likely be available Friday, August 10, 2007. The events map runs on a combination of Flash and MySQL, while the slideshow runs off of Flash and XML.

Still, that cynicism of overhyped coverage should be reserved not for the politicians but for the news outlets covering the election that grasp onto novelty for novelty's sake. These technologies - Web, blog, and online video - are communications tools. They are important because they very well can help honest politicians communicate with their constituents.

Of course, they can also help dishonest politicians seem to communicate without actually communicating. Most news coverage of the politics of the Internet doesn't actually bother to help people make the distinction.

But what of the people tasked to introduce technology into political campaigns? What is it like to be working on a campaign's IT team in the age when it only recently became clear that a political campaign needs an IT team? We had an opportunity to talk with Jon-David Schlough, who manages IT operations and online communications for the Al Franken campaign for senate in Minnesota.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "The Intersection of Politics and Technology: Talking with Jon-David Schlough, Interactive & IT Operations for the Al Franken for Senate, 2008 campaign." »

The big problem with WAN Optimization and Application Performance Monitoring was that there simply wasn't a WAN Optimization solution on the market that preserved end-to-end performance data, nor a monitoring solution that would work in an optimized WAN.

This problem has been solved.

At Cisco Networkers in Anaheim, NetQoS gave a presentation to hundreds of attendees to make the announcement that we've been working with Cisco to develop a management interface for accurate end-to-end application response time measurement that works on optimized networks. (In addition to the people mobbing our booth, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, stopped by for a chat and review of what we do.)

Through integrated software on Cisco Wide Area Application Services devices (WAAS), TCP header information is exported to NetQoS SuperAgent (an end-to-end application performance monitoring module) before optimization occurs - preserving that information. Finally, IT organizations can accurately validate the results of WAN Optimization deployments.

(Continued…)

Continue reading "Tracking The Optimized WAN: NetQoS Integrates with Cisco WAAS to Deliver End-to-End Application Response Time Reporting for WAN Optimization" »

John Mao, product manager at NetQoS, quickly explains the impact of WAN Optimization on Cisco IOS NetFlow/IPFIX information gathering in a short video, as part of our "Whiteboard Series."

If you have questions about the video, please leave a comment below and we'll do our best to answer them.
--------------
More information:

On WAN Optimization:
- NetQoS and Cisco Webinar: Evaluating WAN Optimization Options and Quantifying the Results

On NetFlow Monitoring :

Also in our Whiteboard Series:
- The impact of WAN Optimization on TCP Applications

With John Mao:
- Six Tips for Improving Network Visibility and Performance Using Cisco IOS NetFlow Data

Some people, when they want to test the resistance of rubber-soled shoes, take the shoes to a lab and perform tests under controlled conditions. Others stand outside in the storm and hold up a lightning rod.

Similarly, when Xoops.org's servers needed to be load tested, instead of relying on canned data, they posted to Digg.com, notorious for the Digg effect, and asked for help performance testing their server under high load. The posting got over 2,000 diggs, and ended up on the front page of the site where, as expected, the site got hammered. We interviewed James Morris, one of the volunteer server administrators for the Xoops.org site, via IM, to ask him about his experiences.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "No Data Like Real Data: “Real-World” Performance Testing with Digg" »

By Ben Erwin, Product Manager for NetQoS Performance Center 3.0
& Steve Harriman, Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS:

We've recently held a Webinar to discuss NetQoS Performance Center 3.0. We had a Q&A session there and we would like to reproduce some of the questions attendees asked about NetQoS Performance Center 3.0, and the answers we provided. We also plan to answer the questions we couldn't get to during the Webinar on this blog by the end of this week.

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Q&A on NetQoS Performance Center 3.0" »

By Brian Boyko

If you spend some time poring through RFC documents (something I don’t recommend for the 99% of the population that is still sane) you’ll find tons of improvements, modifications, case-specific optimizations and alternatives to TCP, the workhorse of networking transport protocols since the 1970s.

Seth Noble, President and Founder of Data Expedition, Inc., believes that he can do one better. His company claims that their proprietary transport protocol, MTP, for “Multipurpose Transaction Protocol,” provides a scalable alternative to TCP that uses bandwidth more efficiently. According to Mr. Noble:

“TCP's 1970's data model makes dealing with this problem more difficult than it needs to be. TCP was created with the assumption that packet loss would "rarely" occur, and so it is rather fragile in our modern, congested networks. A lot of very smart people have tried for many years to patch TCP and help it cope, but it still carries its 30 year old legacy with it.”

“MTP/IP was designed from scratch to operate in congested environments where packet loss and other network problems are common. As a result, MTP/IP does an exceptionally good job of quickly AND correctly identifying whether or not data has really been lost and then recovering that data with little or no disruption.”

(Continued...)

Continue reading "Proprietary MTP: an alternative to TCP?" »